Watkins Glen: The Village That Got Famous Twice
Near Watkins Glen, New York
Watkins Glen sits at the southern tip of Seneca Lake, the longest and deepest of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. The village became famous twice in American life, and in entirely different ways. One fame belongs to the gorge, a narrow canyon with nineteen waterfalls that a creek carved at the edge of town, a geological wonder people have been hiking through for more than a century.
The other belongs to a purpose-built racetrack just southwest of the village, where the United States Grand Prix ran for twenty consecutive years and where American road racing found its footing again after the Second World War. The land around the southern end of Seneca Lake was purchased in seventeen ninety one by investors John Watkins and Royal Flint, who paid the state of New York forty two cents per acre for three hundred twenty five thousand acres. A developer named Samuel Watkins came in and built roads, mills, and a hotel, laying out a street grid named after heroes of the Revolution with Benjamin Franklin's name on the main street.
The village was incorporated in eighteen forty two as Jefferson, renamed Watkins in eighteen fifty two in Samuel Watkins's honor, and given its final form in nineteen twenty six when the word Glen was added to acknowledge the canyon that had always defined the place. That gorge was cut by Glen Creek over thousands of years. When the last glaciers deepened the Seneca valley, the tributary stream was left perched far above the new valley floor.
The steep drop set the creek to cutting through shale and sandstone and limestone, producing a canyon four hundred feet deep with nineteen waterfalls in one and a half miles. The state made it a public park in nineteen oh six. Beneath the village, workers drilling for petroleum in eighteen eighty two struck salt brine instead, the residue of an inland sea that lay here more than three hundred million years ago.
The Watkins Salt Company that grew from that discovery became one of the largest independent salt producers in the country before Cargill purchased it in nineteen seventy six. Today Seneca Lake's shores hold dozens of wineries. In the cold of upstate New York, on hillsides shaped by glaciers, the Finger Lakes has become one of the most respected wine regions in the United States, known especially for Riesling grapes grown on those ancient slopes.
